Le Grand Continental: Rehearsal 4

Last night the film crew who are making a documentary on our making of the Vancouver version of Le Grand Continental were back at the Ukrainian Hall. It's the same team who made last year's Kiss the Rabbit, the look at Gob Squad's Super Night Shot that also doubled as a 10th anniversary celebration of the PuSh Festival. They are a really easy-going and unobtrusive team, but it was hard not to think that the camera was directly aimed at you the whole time, capturing your every misstep.

There were certainly a few of those, particularly in the new section that Sylvain introduced us to, one that will lead us into the funk bit that we all performed at our auditions. Other than that, we concentrated on perfecting the "Ima" and "India" sections, and the transition between the two. This involved Sylvain demonstrating to us just how closely we would be dancing next to each other once we merge with Group B on Saturday. Discovering how tight our movements would hereafter need to be was instructive, as I have tended to be all over the place spatially so far--traveling too much sometimes, and not enough at others. Now I'll be additionally worried about not kicking anyone, or hitting them in the head when I do my big arms.

This week is our last one with Sylvain until after Christmas. Understandably, he needs to head back to his life in Montreal. Everyone's shoulders visibly sagged last night when Lara informed us of this news--to be expected given that both the process and phenomenon of Le Grand Continental are very much tied to Sylvain and his winning personality. One plows on in spite of one's mistakes because he is so encouraging. And because he doesn't let us off the hook. One wants to be better, to get the movement just right, because he makes us believe in the importance of this.

But he has chosen well in Lara and Caroline as rehearsal instructors. Like Sylvain, they are both encouraging mentors and rigorous taskmasters. Not to mention excellent dancers! We also learned last night that they will be dancing in the piece alongside us in January. That will certainly elevate the overall impression we make. Now all I have to do is figure out a way to be near one of them in performance.

P.

Kiss the Rabbit

Last night at the Vancity Theatre on Seymour Street there was a special screening of Kiss the Rabbit, a commemorative documentary in celebration of the PuSh Festival's 10th anniversary. The main focus of the documentary is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of this past festival's opening gala presentation of Gob Squad's Super Night Shot, about which I have previously blogged here. On that front alone, the film is fascinating account of the Nottingham and Berlin-based collective's process, and the various contingencies and moments of placed-based serendipity that are a necessary part of the making of such a work.

However, the documentary is also a wonderful celebration of all things PuSh, and its legacy to the city over the past ten years. To that end, it features a series of talking head sound bites from the extended PuSh family. And what an amazingly articulate bunch we are! I was sitting in dread waiting to see what clips from my own interview would be used; but mercifully I sound kind of intelligent, with no glaring uhms or malapropisms marring my speech.

But the real star of the show is PuSh, and the film is a great calling card for our next decade. Thanks to our friends at Telus Optik Local for providing funds; you can catch the film on whatever platform you choose by visiting their on demand site.

P.

PuSh 2014: Gob Squad's Kitchen

It’s the end of the first week of PuSh, and momentum is definitely building. Last night we had three sold-out, or nearly sold-out shows, two of them in large venues: Gob Squad’s Kitchen at the Fei and Milton Wong, SFU Woodward’s; Danse Lhasa Danse at the Chan Centre (1200 seats!); and A Brimful of Asha at the Revue Stage on Granville Island. This in addition to the final performance of The Pixelated Revolution at SFU Woodward’s Studio T and, of course, Club PuSh, where Calgary’s Woodpigeon joined forces with the Coastal Sound Youth Choir for back-to-back performances

Much as one would like, one can’t be everywhere at once, and so from the above smorgasbord of choice, Richard and I opted for Kitchen. A live video and theatrical recreation of several of Andy Warhol’s iconic Factory films, the piece asks what appears to be initially glib and then turns out to be quite profound questions about the relationship between liveness and documentation, reality and simulation, the past and the present. Entering the Wong Theatre single file via its backstage door, the audience encounters not just the members of the Gob Squad ensemble, but also the three makeshift sets on which their experiments will be played out. Once the piece begins, these sets are viewed as black and white projections on three side-by-side screens. In the middle, and comprising the main focus of attention, is the kitchen of the title, in which the mustachioed Shaun and Edie Sedgwick-lookalike Sharon set about channeling the sexual energy of the swinging 60s in order to reenact as authentically as possible the action of Warhol’s original film. Except that the table cloth on the kitchen table is more 50s than 60s, and the foodstuffs they’ve stocked their shelves with have clearly come from Nester’s supermarket, and Shaun’s claim that he likes his coffee the way he likes his men—strong, hot, and black—is ridiculous and deliberately cringe-making in its comic hyperbole.

This is just the start of the mayhem unleashed as a result of the collective’s attempts to make sense of—and ideally make work for them—the ever-widening gap between themselves, the selves they are playing in 2014, and the selves those selves are supposed to be standing in for in 1965. For example, on the screen to the audience’s left of the central kitchen panel, Sarah is trying to sleep—in homage to Warhol’s seven-hour film of his slumbering lover John Giorno. But, as she explains to Shaun, she’s really only pretending to sleep. And so, by said logic, she somehow convinces him to pretend to be her pretending to sleep. Meanwhile, Simon, having completed his single take screen test on the audience right panel, says to Sharon that it’s her turn, and all she has to do is sit in front of the camera and “be herself.” Easier said than done for Sharon, who over the course of the next ten minutes proceeds to drape a number of scarves and other items of clothing about her, eventually putting a plastic bag over her head, which as she eventually says to a panicked Simon was just her playing, but which is nevertheless increasingly uncomfortable for us to watch as we see the bag fog up before us.

At first all of this is played very broadly and comically, and one thinks this is—to borrow a couple of terms from another Sedgwick, this one Eve Kosofsky—a slightly sneering, post-postmodern, “kitsch-attributive” response to material long recognized (and valued) as camp. And, it’s true, there is certainly a way in which the company’s fumbling attempts to figure out how a newly liberated gay male sexuality would have been played (apparently with outsized sunglasses, a white fur coat and an ersatz Brooklyn accent), or whose breasts—Sarah’s or Sharon’s—are more authentically feminist, or even how one would have danced back then—exposes some of the closed clique-iness and narcissism of Warhol’s self-anointing superstar world. But then, one by one, the Gob Squad players begin to break the cinematic frame, coming out from behind the projection screens to seek out audience avatars for their own on-screen personas. This adds yet another inevitable layer of mimeticism. But within this feedback loop—and what remains among the most moving aspects of the piece—these audience members are also allowed and indeed encouraged to play themselves, to translate their quotidian lives in the here and now into something timeless and mythic within the space of the camera’s frame.

And so it was in Shaun’s interactions with Fiona in Screen Test and Sarah’s with Jane in Sleep—and then, quite beautifully, in Kiss—that I was not only able to witness what of the revolutionary spirit of Warhol’s era remains today, but also how, through the remediating temporality of performance itself, we all have the potential to be superstars.

P.

PuSh 2014: Super Night Shot

So the party got started in a big way last night: the 10th anniversary celebrations of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival kicked off at the Playhouse with Gob Squad's Super Night Shot. An arts collective based in the UK and Germany, Gob Squad have toured this piece to six continents, performing it more than 200 times. In each case, the premise and parameters are the same, though the changing location--and especially the people encountered there--always means that the results will be unique.

An hour before the performance begins, four members of Gob Squad turn on their Sony digital cameras, synchronize their watches, and introduce their roles in the film they are about to collectively shoot on the streets of Vancouver. One of them--Simon--has been elected to play the hero in the film, the aim of which is not merely to capture a real-time representation of the city, but also, in the process, to "declare a war anonymity." To this end, another member of the quartet has been tasked with finding among the citizens of Vancouver a romantic co-star for Simon, someone who--regardless of age or gender or ethnicity--will agree to kiss our hero (or at the very least his rabbit mask) at the climax of the film. A third member's job is to do advance publicity for the film, which involves pasting cut-out images of Simon's face on various available surfaces and, in one memorable sequence, announcing the film's premiere to the packed diners in a trendy restaurant (the Flying Pig, I think it was). Finally, a location scout is sent in search of the perfect spot for the film's concluding clinch; since none of our four intrepid filmmakers ever really leaves Gastown, this of course turns out to be the steam clock at the corner of Water and Abbott.

There are some rules governing all of this mayhem: the cameras must continue to roll for the duration of the film, with no cuts allowed; and the film has to look good, a dictum easier said than done given that each of the four members serve as their own crew, holding their cameras--mounted on mini-tripods--in front of them as they walk the streets of Gastown. Occasionally the performers set the cameras down on the ground and interrupt their vérité shoot with some Busby Berkeley-style bits of song and dance--quite literally in the case of a group rap and an homage to Singin' in the Rain (though, ironically, last night Vancouver's skies were clear). Obviously, then, the conceptual parameters of the piece allow the performers some control over its outcome. At the same time, their various contingent encounters with the people whose paths they cross--some of whom are suspicious and brusque, others of whom are highly voluble and wonderfully garrulous--reflect back to us some necessary (because instantly recognizable) shocks to our collective civic nervous system. Simon, wanting to do good, encounters a homeless man early on and offers to buy him something to eat at the local supermarket; but soon after the man has convinced him that he can best help him out by buying him some ciders at the liquor store. And near the conclusion of  the film, looking to redistribute, as instructed, the wealth (in this case a toonie) he has managed to collect from a single passer-by, Simon places the money in the cup of a panhandler who says he'll use it to buy a beer.

Meanwhile, our casting agent is getting anxious because they're approaching the end of the film and he still hasn't found someone to kiss Simon. Mercifully, he comes upon a group of friends whom I took to be foreign language students (an interesting comment on the economic, geographic, and social intersections of the local and the global). He manages to persuade one of them--Rodrigo--to kiss Simon in his rabbit mask and they rush off to get their shot.

This accomplished, the team then climbs into a waiting rental car and hightails it over to the Playhouse, where we have been waiting to cheer their arrival. Only then do we actually enter the auditorium, with the footage (including a final sequence filmed from the balcony of the theatre) the collective has gathered projected before us on four side-by-side screens. It makes for a doubly uncanny experience, the déjà vu of what we are witnessing coming not just from the instantly recognizable images reproduced before us, but from the familiar (in ways both good and bad) story of our city they tell.

Given that, as PuSh Artistic and Executive Director Norman Armour announced in his speech following the screening, the Festival is so much about place (a theme echoed in the broadside published to coincide with the 10th anniversary, in which yours truly has a short essay), it was an absolutely spot-on opening. I look forward to what remains in store from PuSh over the next three weeks--and in the decades to come.

Happy birthday everyone!

P.

PuSh at 10

Another new year brings another PuSh Festival. This year is our 10th anniversary, and in the lead up to the event Communications Manager Bonnie Sun has asked a few of us "to provide a little insight into [our] PuSh experience and what the Festival has meant to [us]."

My thoughts have just been posted to the PuShing it blog here, alongside a very embarrassing photo of myself, aged 10.

The Festival opens January 14th, with Gob Squad's Super Night Shot at the Playhouse. See you there.

P.